(WIP) N01R Book 1: Quintessence | ~141,560 words | NEW UPDATE: July 8th, 2026

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New Spire City.

A shining metropolis built on an isthmus between two continents. The last great symbol of hope. Where the dregs of the world coalesce into one great, big floating heap of s—.

Whatever you call it, NSC is impossible to ignore.

…Even more so after the mayor’s murder.

You play as a private investigator, struggling to make a living within a city that’s almost at war with itself. When the assistant of the recently-slain mayor of your district walks into your office, one day, your life will change forever…

In N01R, you can…

  • Customize your private investigator! Be gay, straight, or bisexual; aromantic or asexual.
  • Work to solve the gruesome murder of Mayor Adam Bergman in this thrilling noir mystery! Will you work to see justice served…or are you just in it for the money?
  • Interact with the corrupt cyberpunk landscape of New Spire City as a human, an android, a cyborg, or an artificial intelligence!
  • Romance the mayor’s shy former assistant, a tenacious reporter, or a sultry lounge singer!
  • Use your investigator’s skills and traits to solve problems and find unique solutions to obstacles…but be careful not to let your stress overwhelm you!

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Content Warning

This game contains profanity, scenes of violence, references to drugs and alcohol, mentions of murder and suicide, and optional sexual content.

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Changelog

May 26th, 2026: Initial upload.

June 15th, 2026: Fixes, additional flirt options, chapter 3 and interlude 1.

July 8th, 2026: Spelling/grammar/punctuation fixes, interlude 2, and chapter 4.

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Word count (including code)

Introduction, stats screen, chapters 1-4, and 2 interludes: ~141,560

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LINK TO GAME ON CoGDEMOS

LINK TO GAME ON ITCH

TUMBLR

PATREON

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Please feel free to tell me any thoughts, concerns, or questions you may have. I would also like to thank everyone who has supported me in any way during my last projects!

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No — This project does not contain the output of Generative AI
Yes — This project contains the output of Generative AI

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June 2026 Writer Support Thread
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Thought #1: yay!
Thought #2: not a fan of opening with a huge infodump.
Thought #3: enjoying the parts with the actual MC in it.
Thought #4: Why does the game allow you to call yourself a detective if it’s then going to lecture you for it?
Thought #5: okay, this customization requires more brainpower than what I have available right now, I’ll need to come back later.

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Your writing is solid and the story is interesting so far, that said having nothing but exposition right off the bat can be off putting to some, also i’m still not entirely certain what the real different between an android and an ai are… they’re both artificial intelligences no?

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Wow, that’s a lot of thoughts, haha! (:

I meant it more as the narrator pointing out that the player character has never had any formal training or licensing to be able to officially call themself a “detective.”

In a purely descriptive sense, yes (i.e. they are both intelligences that can be described as “artificial,” meaning inorganic or developing consciousness like things that are born through sexual reproduction do)! The main difference between androids and AGIs in this setting is that the former are preprogrammed with certain instinctual operations (I think the narration lists breathing as one?), whereas an artificial intelligence like the player character would need to have independently developed consciousness as a concept first, and then built up to sapience.

AGIs are so alien to both organic and inorganic life in this world because it’s hard to even conceptualize something like sapience in a form that was not developed through evolution or defined as a consequence of it, like it was with androids.

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Agreed with the other comments, the colossal info dump should probably be shifted to either a lore section on the stats screen, or split more evenly. However, I will say that after reading through all of it I can applaud the very vivid world you’ve created so far.

I have not found any gameplay bugs. The character creation is indeed very in depth and intriguing, especially the android, ai, human, cyborg section.

Looking forward to seeing where this one goes!

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I might do that. Until I figure out how to deal with it, exactly, I’ve just added an option to skip it.

Thank you! I appreciate that.

Ahaha, luckily I hadn’t been so fortunate! I ran into a bug when trying to reroll your character’s skill points, but I think I’ve fixed it.

You and me both! (:

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W̵h̵a̵t̵’̵s̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵ ̵d̵i̵f̵f̵e̵r̵e̵n̵c̵e̵ ̵b̵e̵t̵w̵e̵e̵n̵ ̵p̵l̵a̵y̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵a̵n̵ ̵a̵n̵d̵r̵o̵i̵d̵ ̵a̵n̵d̵ ̵a̵n̵ ̵a̵r̵t̵i̵f̵i̵c̵i̵a̵l̵ ̵i̵n̵t̵e̵l̵l̵i̵g̵e̵n̵c̵e̵?̵ (Saw the post above explaining this). Also, how are you going to handle the sexual content with the latter (I’m assuming we’re more than just a virtual presence)?

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That is quite the info dump at the start. Adding the ability to skip was a good idea for now. I did notice a typo-when talking about the war. You write “lied dead” when it should be “lay dead”.

Also, during character creation, when you select woman and it asks about your pronouns you have a mistake with doubled 'you’s instead of the second one being ‘use’. “And, as a woman, you you feminine pronouns, right?”

I’m still reading through, but I like the options and writing style- except that city history section at the start. It feels different, maybe too informal and too much direct reference to ‘you’ and ‘your world’ before we meet our own character or get any sense of things?

If I were you I’d probably break it up and sprinkle that info organically a bit at a time as relevant topics bring it up.

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The AI route is incredibly compelling. Is it correct to assume that we’re like the early(albeit weaker) form of Skynet in the Terminator series?

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The hardware in the player character’s body, like an actual android, has touch/temperature sensors and subroutines to simulate that sort of thing.

Fixed! The correct spelling will be visible whenever I next update.

Hmmmm… I think this might be a consequence of me intentionally writing the narration from what I perceive as a “noir-style” voiceover. When I think of a noir introducing the plot, the tone is usually cynical and the language is casual.

Thank you!

It’s been forever since I’ve seen that movie, but I think that’s a fair comparison. …The player character would never have been given access to any nukes, though, haha!

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It reminded me of the Terminator movies cause Skynet is basically CoReEE, Air-N and TayLoR all rolled into one, even before it was given access to nukes.

I’m curious though. Would the AI have grown in power and capabilities if they hid their sentience like Skynet and not limited by a single android body? Conceptually, their abilities and potential should be beyond other androids, right?

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Hmmm… Potentially…? I think that it would’ve been nearly impossible (with the possible exception of Air-N, who was designed as an infiltration tool) for the player character AI to reach that level of destructiveness, purely because they were only ever designed to be connected to a local network. Their capability would have been limited by their construction and purpose. You don’t need to connect an array of cameras, like Dev-N was, to the internet, for example. Think those early photos of computers the size of entire rooms rather than an incorporeal being capable of finding information remotely/connecting to outside systems.

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I can sort of see that, but I think what you miss with that, is in the case of interactive fiction like Choicescript, we aren’t automatically learning about our character in such an open. In a traditional noir novel in first person, the opening paragraphs, even if not describing the protagonist, are being narrated BY the protagonist, so we are still learning something about them through their word choice and what they choose to focus on or tell us about.

In this case, in a Choicescript game of this type the narrator is normally neutral or framed from the perspective of your character. You do this well once we actually GET to our character and start creating them, but the opening the way it is gives us no “hat to hang our narration on”, if that makes any sense.

I think it makes more sense to maybe start with the license renewal, bring up the New Spire City location there just as a quick location establishment, then have the player notice the Spire on leaving and get a bit of history of it, maybe notice a bit of the ground as they head back to their office and then bring up how it’s actually made / not natural, maybe witness an interaction between a human and android on the way home and use it as an opportunity to discuss the war briefly, and then discuss actual android history when you bring up the murdered mayor. It would ground everything more and give the player time to breath between everything.

This is personal preference, and you’re free to do with it as you like, but I also felt the “big heap of shit” line was pretty jarring to be right at the start of a book. I’m not even against cursing, but it made me do a double-take and stopped me for a second. Again, it’s probably because I’m used to a more neutral narrator before the player gets to start making decisions, and the opening as it is seems disembodied.

I’ve been playing the AI route so far, and it’s very interesting.

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Also they don’t usually spend pages on explaining the history of the Great War and Los Angeles/Oslo/Stockholm/[insert city here], if it’s important it’s delivered when it’s important.

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Yeah, that’s an entirely different issue with the info dump opening. It would probably work better for world building if we just got glimpses of what makes New Spire City different and curiosity would naturally build up in the reader/player over time so that they WANT to know all the gritty details.

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I have taken your suggestions into account and rearranged the introduction to more organically introduce information.

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could we get more timid choices for romance? I want to start a romance without being super flirty.

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Sure! I will write some more and they’ll be present whenever the next update goes public. (:

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The change from ‘shit’ to ‘misery’ works well and I think better conveys the context you are going for.

The re-arranging of the background info is much improved, but I still wonder if we need quite so much of the info upfront. I think the founder of New Spire City would work better if kept more mysterious. It feels like we are handed a whole wikipedia article up front on him, when arguably all we need to know of Angenent up front is that he was the world’s first trillionaire and so morally compromised that he built his own country so he wouldn’t have to follow any rules, and did it by buying dirt from beneath the feet of everyone else.

I think you are going for an Andrew Ryan Rapture type vibe, right? Remember that character’s strong intro was only 100 words and was immediately compelling because it left players wanting more and curious to see what he built.

Your android and AI world building is the most compelling, and at three pages it still seems a bit long.

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Thank you!

Hmmm… Angenent and his family will end up being a bit more important than what you’re describing, I think, and so I believe that this amount of introductory text is appropriate. Their family will not ultimately be the mere measuring stick for the extent of what immorality the upper classes can get away with, but nor will they be actual characters. …In this book, at least.

About a third of that is also world-building for relevant city information (mayoral elections, corrupt journalism, etc.) and establishing that the scientific industry of NSC is as capitalistic as any other venture. Now, these are part and parcel for the genres of cyberpunk and noir, but I feel that they still warrant a bit of dedicated text for readers that might not be familiar with these types of stories.

On this point, I think we will just have to agree to disagree, haha! (:

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